GEESE 



broadside, waved me good luck, and continued 

 on his way. 



As I stood there striving to make my distress 

 heard by that vanishing messenger, geese, 

 brant, ducks, and other shy feathered crea- 

 tures of the wild poured out of the sky and 

 tried to alight upon me, or so it seemed. 

 They came in clouds and I shooed them off 

 like mosquitoes. One would have thought it 

 was the nesting season, and I was an egg. 



I read again that hideous message as I 

 undertook to reload, but I trembled the 

 trigger off and barely missed destroying my 

 left foot my favorite. Never in the annals 

 of battery shooting has there been another 

 day like that. Those ducks reorganized and 

 launched attack after attack upon me, but 

 my nerve was gone, and the most I could do 

 was defend myself blindly. 



I did spill blood during one assault, and I 

 was encouraged until I found that I had shot 

 one of Ri's live decoys. Beyond that, the 

 casualties were negligible, and when the guides 

 came to pick me up they had to beat the 

 blackheads out of the decoys with an oar. 



As we pulled out of Ocracoke at dawn the 

 next morning, the town was full of dead birds, 



37 



